Protecting Text on my Site... Is it possible?

pdf text protect

[EvilDan]

Hi everyone

I am about to launch a text based website, with many original stories.

I have noticed that a lot of off shore SERPS snaffu (steal) other peoples original text, and use it to build up their blogs etc.

So I have been looking into protecting my text, whilst still letting the search engines spider my pages.

Is this even possible?

One idea I had was to put all my documents onto Adobe PDF files, which would then be copy protected. And I believe Google is quite happy to index a PDF file, but I am not sure if they can still do this if my pages are copy protected

(Also... disabling right click functionality on web browsers is no barriers to the professional thieves)

Any ideas at all would be greatly appreciated

[zulu_dude]

Putting the text into PDF files would probably work... but it'd also be incredibly annoying for users to have to open a pdf file every time they wanted to read an article on your site. You need to strike a balance between protection for you and irritation for your users.

You could try putting a short intro to the article on your site, in plain text. Then if the user wants to read the full article, they can download the PDF. That way the user doesn't have to download hundreds of PDFs to find the article they want and you're able to protect your content.

AFAIK unfortunately there isn't a way to protect your text like you're suggesting. If the HTML browser can read the text to display it on the screen, then a user will be able to get their hands on it as well.

[hunderdown]

Copyright your content. Go after infringers aggressively using DMCA complaints, etc.

But remember that you can't protect it 100% unless you don't publish it at all. There are some ebook formats that effectively prevent copy-and-paste thieves, but even those formats can't stop a fast typist from retyping every word they see!

[j_h_maccann]

I'm not so sure that copy-protecting PDFs will
be effective. I have some contributors who send
me content in PDF files (created by Acrobat from
MS Word), and their defaults apparently are to
set a password against selection, copying,
printing, and everything else. So I can do
nothing with their submissions.

I used to write back asking for their passwords
or trying to convince them to use some other format.
Now I just run an Adobe Password Remover program
on the PDFs, and all the security is instantly
removed--never failed yet.